I have a master’s degree from one of the best schools in the world – and it hurts me to admit it, I don’t think it delivered much value. Indeed I likely would have learned as much, if not more, had I stuck with just my undergrad and kept working for those two yeas.

Dropping $50,000 and two years of life is an incredible sacrifice. To ask someone to make such a sacrifice you really need to have a solid value proposition, one you can consistently deliver, and one that can’t be easily had anywhere else.

In my experience, higher education’s value proposition is weakly defined, inconsistently executed, and can often be acquired from other sources at a fraction of the cost (in time, money and effort). Sounds like the situation facing traditional media, no?

Higher education institutions leave so much up to the individual student’s drive, determination and luck to get an education that one has to wonder if the institution itself is even necessary–other than to provide buildings where lots of smart people can bump into each other.

I’m not really as down on higher education as I sound here. Still, I think the systems is flawed in many of the same ways traditional media is flawed, and without change will likely and deservedly suffer a similar fate (just lot more slowly). Students I think are on the verge of being forced to find education solutions that offer better cost-benefit ratios.

And the primary worry I have in this post is that maybe in a few years someone will say of higher ed that we “have no one but themselves to blame for their downfall. This has been coming for a long time and they failed to heed the warnings.”

Traditional media have no one but themselves to blame for their downfall. This has been coming for a long time and they failed to heed the warnings.

I worked in the industry from the late 80’s until 2000 and none of the companies I worked for took the internet seriously, despite warnings from many that this internet thing might just change a couple things.

It also took many media players an awful long time to wake up to the fact that their product is information and not the distribution channel. My personal illustration of this was bearing witness to the gutting of newsrooms in the mid and late 90’s and the reliance (by broadcasters especially) on central news agencies and wire services. Rip and read newscasts became the norm, especially in smaller markets. Most media outlets stopped producing their core product – information – and began outsourcing it to Reuters and the Associated/Canadian Press. Instead they bolstered their sales forces and concentrated on maximizing ad revenues. And then Craigslist/Adsense came in and cut them off at the knees.

When the retrospective on the death of traditional media is created, arrogance and shortsightedness will be central themes in the story.

That said, I don’t write them off. For a lot of people, many traditional media outlets still have remnants of that elusive substance called credibility left. If they can wake up and shake off their collective Nancy Grace’s then I think they still have a surprise or two left in their arsenal.

My own view is a bit different. From where I sit, traditional media has long since ceased to serve the function of reporting and investigating. For at least the last two decades, it has served mostly as a means or propaganda, representing the voice of special (monied) interests, and not doing anything that would shake their hold on power.

Time and time again they would simply propagate the truism of the day – Iraq has WMDs, housing prices will always go up, the stock market is a good place for your retirement savings, etc. We have now seen the paucity of such reporting, and I won’t regret seeing these agents of considerable damage meet their demise.

Tradidional media are committing suicide by auctioning off their credibility and racing for the lowest common quality denominator.

It seems that traditional media are pushing their audience away as much, or perhaps more, than new media are pulling them.

Jon, I was a bit worried that I was mentioning the affair with insufficient information, and maybe that’s the case here. I have enjoyed some of Russell Brand’s stuff, and would be interested in recommendations on what to check out to get a sense of Ross. Sounds like the nasty war between Daily Mail and Brand was a big factor here.

Having said that, I listened to the audio of those calls, and I stand by the characterization of Ross/Brand flailing desperately for laughs – in those clips, at least, they sound like British versions of the Morning Zoo Crews that litter the American airwaves.

And the furore about this incident does have to do with the internet, but not in the way you suggest… the media storm has been whipped up on the net. The program itself attracted exactly two complaints when it was first broadcast.

And as for the object of all the fuss. Well, as Blood and Treasure says about Georgina Baillie, aka Volupta if it were me I’d be a little upset about some of my granddaughter’s career choices.

Just my 2c.